Ray Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and editor born in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999) and Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), which received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, as well as of six other books of poetry, including three from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals, Cabato Sentora, and the forthcoming The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande. Creative Arts Books will publish his collection of short-short fictions, Circling the Tortilla Dragon, in 2002 and Arizona will release his second collection of essays, The Underground Heart: Essays From Hidden Landscapes in 2002.

His poetry has appeared in the 1999 and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press). His non-fiction is included in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing (W.W. Norton). He received an MFA from Southwest Texas State University and is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of the Latino Renaissance (Anchor/Doubleday Books, 1998). He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for twenty years and founded Luna, a poetry journal, in 1998.

Among his awards are a 2000 Loft Literary Center Career Initiative Fellowship, a 1998 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, a 1993 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Excellence in Editing, and a 1988 Colorado Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. He is an Associate Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

EPR #3:
BIOGRAPHY OF A SCORPION EATER
ADD NOTHING TO THE SHATTERED BIRD
FOREVER'S VIOLIN